SHAMBHALA SUN MArcH 2009 81
and yet, such a wild ride between hope and fear is unavoid-
able. fear is the necessary consequence of feeling hopeful again.
Contrary to our belief that hope and fear are opposites where
one trumps the other, they are a single package, bundled to-
gether as intimate, eternal partners. Hope never enters a room
without fear at its side. if i hope to accomplish something, i’m
also afraid i’ll fail. You can’t have one with-
out the other.
those of us raised in western culture were
never taught that fear is the price of hope.
rather, we can’t envision life without hope.
Hell, according to dante, is the place devoid
of hope; he warned Christians condemned
there to “abandon all hope, ye who enter herein.” the Hebrew
prophets warned that without vision, the people perish.
Hope is what propels us into action. we’ve been taught to
dream of a better world as the necessary first step in creating
one. we create a clear vision for the future we want, then we set a
strategy, make a plan, and get to work. we focus strategically on
doing only those things that have a high probability of success.
as long as we “keep hope alive” and work hard, our endeavors
will create the world we want. How could we do our work if we
had no hope that we’d succeed?
Motivated by hope, but then confronted by failure, we become
depressed and demoralized. Life becomes meaningless; we de-
spair of changing things for the better. at such a time, we learn the
price of hope. rather than inspiring and motivating us, hope has
become a burden made heavy by its companion, fear of failing.
so we have to abandon hope, all of us, and learn how to find
the place “beyond hope and fear.” this is a familiar concept in
buddhism, yet little known in western thinking. Liberated from
hope and fear, we are free to discover clarity and energy, but the
journey there demands behaviors we’re not familiar with or have
actively avoided. Here are a few markers of this journey, blessed
wisdom gleaned from the experiences of those who have per-
severed and maintained steadfast focus even when their efforts
have yielded little or no results.
rudolf bahro, a prominent German activist and iconoclast,
describes the first step: “when the forms of an old culture are
dying, the new culture is created by a few people who are not
afraid to be insecure.” bahro offers insecurity as a positive trait,
especially necessary in times of disintegration. Yet is it conceiv-
able to think that feeling insecure would increase our ability to
stay in the work of creating something new?
i don’t know what bahro meant by “insecure”; however, i’ve
noted that those who endure, who have stamina for the long haul
and become wiser in their actions over time, are those who are
not attached to outcomes. they don’t seek security in plans or
accomplishments. they exchange certainty for curiosity, fear for
generosity. they plunge into the problem, treat their attempts
as experiments, and learn as they go. this kind of insecurity is
energizing; people become engaged in figuring out what works
instead of needing to be right or worrying about how to avoid
failure. whenever they discover something that does work, there’s
a huge rush of energy, often accompanied by laughter.
a willingness to feel insecure, then, is the first step on the jour-
ney beyond hope and fear. it leads to the far more challenging
state: groundlessness. this is also a core concept in buddhism—
knowing that nothing ever remains the same, learning to live
with the unrelenting constant of change, realizing that even the
good things won’t last forever, accepting that change is just the
way it is.
Life now insists that we encounter groundlessness. systems
and ideas that seemed reliable and solid dissolve at an increasing
rate. people who asked for our trust betray or abandon us. strat-
egies that worked suddenly don’t. Groundlessness is a frighten-
ing place, at least at first, but as the old culture turns to mush,
we would feel stronger if we stopped searching for ground, if we
sought only to locate ourselves in the present and do our work
from here.
all fear (and hope) arises from looking backward or forward.
the present moment is the only place of clear seeing unclouded
by hope or fear. the nineteenth-century tibetan master patrul
rinpoche stated this perfectly: “don’t prolong the past, don’t invite
the future, don’t be deceived by appearances, just dwell in present
awareness.” of course, trying to be present when everything around
you is crashing down is not easy, but then, nothing is these days.
it takes enormous effort and discipline to keep recalling our-
selves back to the present moment, especially when we see that
decisions being made in the present are harming people or will
have disastrous impacts in the future. Yet only in the present mo-
ment, free from hope and fear, do we receive the gifts of clarity
and resolve. freed also from anger, aggression, and urgency, we
are able to see the situation clearly, take it all in, and discover
what to do. this clarity reveals “right action”—those actions that
feel genuinely appropriate in this moment without any concern
about whether they will succeed or not.
vaclav Havel describes hope as an attribute we carry in us al-
ways, a state of being that is not dependent on outcomes. He led
his nation, the former Czechoslovakia, to freedom from soviet
rule in the “velvet revolution.” as a poet-playwright-activist-
leader, he has given the world many choice and compelling in-
sights. Here’s his description of hope: “Hope is a dimension of
Life now insists that we encounter groundlessness.
Systems and ideas that seemed reliable and solid are
dissolving at an increasing rate.